He took the money without surprise.

It is surely a sign of good breeding to receive one's due with no astonishment.
"Can't you keep me on, sir ?" he pleaded a last time, when I had proved by a gift of a pair of hunting boots (which were too small for me) that we really were about to part.
"My good Loomer, I am going into service myself.

I always said I could black a boot better than you." As I left the room I heard the worthy domestic mutter something about "pretty work," and "a Howard of Hopton," and made no doubt that he regretted less the fall of my ancestral dignity than the loss to himself of a careless and easily robbed master.

At all events I had been under the impression that I possessed a fuller store of linen than that which emerged from my travel-stained trunks when these were unpacked later in the day in the Rue des Palmiers.
As for that matter of ancestral dignity, it gave me no trouble.

Such a possession comes, I think, to little harm while a man keeps it in his own hands, and only falls to pieces when it gets into the grasp of a bad woman.